ean
monarchs is a never-to-be-forgotten experience. So too it is to listen
to the thunder of one of them "foundering"; for their equilibrium is
very unstable, and the action of the sea, as they travel southwards to
their death in the Gulf Stream, cuts them away at the surface of the
water. Blocks weighing unbelievable tons crash off them, or they will
suddenly, without a second's warning, break into a million pieces. I
can never conquer a creepiness of the spine as I listen to one of
these tragedies. It is a startling, new sensation such as we never
expect to meet again after childhood has shut its doors on us. In the
quiet that follows the gigantic disintegration one half expects to see
a new heaven and a new earth emerge out of the chaos of ice quivering
in the water.

You often warned me in the course of the past year how dull life would
be. You knew how I loved a city. I still do. But the last word on
earth one could apply to the life here is "dull." Nature takes care of
that. I defy you to walk along any street in London and see six
porpoises and a whale! That is what I saw this morning. Oh! of course
you may counter by telling me that neither can I see an automobile or
a fire engine, but I have you, because I can answer that I have seen
them already. How are you going to get out of that corner, except by
saying that you do not want to see the old porpoises and whales and
bergs?--and I know your "Scotch" conscience forbids such distortion of
facts.

I have come to believe in the personality of porpoises. They swam
beside the ship, playing about in the water all the while, rolling
over and diving, and chasing each other just as if they knew they had
a "gallery." We did not reward them very well either, for the Prophet
shot one, and we ate bits of him for lunch--the porpoise, I mean, not
the Prophet. I thought he would make a good companion-piece for the
polar bear, and he was quite edible. He only needed a rasher of bacon
to make you believe he was calf's liver.

So you see that between puffins and porpoises and whales, and
"growlers" and lost dories, I crowded enough into one day to give me
dreams that Alice in Wonderland might covet.

In your secret heart don't you wish that you too were

"Where the squat-legged Eskimo
Waddles in the ice and snow,
And the playful polar bear
Nips the hunter unaware;
Where the air is kind o' pure,
And the snow crop's pretty sure"?

_July 22